Development and Test

Skytap is the leading provider of software development and testing Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) to the enterprise. Our cloud-based solution removes inefficiencies and constraints within the modern software development lifecycle. As a result Skytap customers release better software faster.

Skytap customers can model and spin up complex production-like enterprise application environments in seconds, collaborate and share them securely with global teams, and develop and test in parallel without conflicts. IT organizations can offer teams self-service access, while maintaining full visibility and control over capacity and costs atop their cloud infrastructure of choice.

Skytap offers a point-and-click UI that simplifies the process of creating, managing and decommissioning complete environments. Customers can import existing virtualized applications or build new applications in the cloud. Skytap can be easily accessed through any modern web browser or Skytap’s mobile-ready client, as well as driven through REST-based APIs, Command Line Interface (CLI), or ALM, Release Management and Continuous Integration tools (Jenkins, Visual Studio TFS, IBM Urbancode, etc.)

Value

In today’s connected economy, virtually every enterprise depends on software as a core business function. Competitive advantage is gained through software innovation and rapid delivery of new features to meet customer demands, therefore ready environments for development and testing become a critical part of the value chain. Conventional lab approaches require ever-increasing work and expense to build and maintain, while constraining access for teams to test early and often, which can allow costly defects to escape into production.

Increased overall output of the dev/test organization, in terms of valuable new features or improvements with faster time-to-market, enabled by ready self-serve environments for experimenting on and improving software.

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Efficiency

More efficient use of labor across dev/test organizations by eliminating wait time and setup time for complete environments, allowing parallel development and testing to proceed without constraints or conflicts, and avoiding rework due to reproducing bugs.

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Quality

Everyone has access to production-like environments at every phase of the SDLC, allowing them to avoid costly production issues and find/resolve defects up 1-2 phases earlier in the software lifecycle with less effort.

What we traditionally thought of as big enterprise lab infrastructure has become quite affordable. You can now buy very reliable cloud infrastructure (Cloud IaaS) for dev and test, and only pay for what you need. This infrastructure savings is great, but Cloud IaaS alone does not automate away the most time-intensive tasks of developing today’s complex applications, and likely only addresses 20% or less of the app dev spend in most companies.

By far, most of the money spent in delivering business applications is on highly skilled labor: time spent developing, testing and supporting each feature demanded by the business. Each team needs an environment, so they waste a lot of time configuring their own labs, in conflict with other devtest teams over environments, or waiting for IT to provision new ones. Teams hold onto environments, and every dev and test system they hoard consumes capacity. Every system that is put in play can have a maintenance cost for labor that goes on and on.

Skytap’s solutions provide the automation and intelligence atop cloud infrastructure needed to resolve this 80/20 rule and transform the software development lifecycle.

Key Differentiators

Skytap Environments-as-a-Service for Dev/Test is a solution purpose-built for supporting the highly variable workflows of enterprise software lifeycles. Here’s why leading companies are offloading millions of pre-production lab resources to Skytap every month:

Built for Complex Dev/Test Environments

Not just a bunch of VMs or server images — Skytap represents the entire system toplogy, including appliances, load balancers, advanced networks, firewalls, and domain settings

Mirrors detailed server & cluster configurations from Infrastructure-as-Code instructions or build/deploy tools as “golden state” templates that can be deployed in the proper sequence and rapidly cloned

Easy import and nesting of existing VMs of many different types, and other system assets, including virtual data and virtual services to populate secure or unavailable content in the test lab.

Multiple dev and test teams work in parallel without conflicts in on-demand environments with burst capacity for peak usage cycles

Instantly suspend, copy and share environments between test and dev teams to allow triage and rapid resolution of issues, developers spend less time reproducing defects in the exact environment the error occurred in.

Manage permissions to any environment or underlying resource at a department or user level so project roles can be carried out in a multi-tenant lab environment with less interference

Copy-to-Region allows environments to be suspended and moved across global cloud infrastructures for true “follow-the-sun” development projects

Deliver universal access to secure web instances of labs, even to non-login users or testers, with published URL capability

Built for IT/Operations Control:

Deliver self-service provisioning to teams without sacrificing control

Dashboards, metrics and alerts to help maintain visibility and manage resource usage

Set permissions and quotas by department for chargeback accounting or resource allocation purposes

Automate and schedule the provisioning, as well as the shutdown of idle environments for conservation